"Scientists Say": We Need Science to Affirm Empathy

William Deresiwicz at the The American Scholar takes on our friends at the New York Times for another example of scientism: the need to use the authority of science to explain attributes of humanity that have been explained for years by, among others, novelists and playwrights.

John West has a book coming out (The Magician's Twin) on C. S. Lewis and his early warnings about scientism, that secular cult that tries to make materialism the judge of all things human. To oppose scientism is not to oppose science, of course, though the scientism practitioner would like to make it seem so. Properly understood, it really is a science heresy.